Urgent physical performances from Tahar Rahim and Léa Seydoux power this tale of toxic love in the poisonously radioactive shadow of a nuclear power plant. Originally inspired by Elisabeth Filhol's novel La Centrale, which shone a pre-Fukushima light upon the perilous working environments of subcontractors in the nuclear industry, Gaëlle Macé and co-writer/director Rebecca Zlotowski's contrived but affecting screenplay places Rahim's unqualified worker (a modern working-class hero) in ever-increasing danger as he prolongs his intoxicating spell at the plant in order to stay within the fallout zone of Seydoux's irradiating charms.

While the central love-and-death metaphor may be overripe and overwritten (a knee-weakening kiss is theatrically used to illustrate the symptoms of radiation sickness), Rahim and Seydoux keep things grounded in the familiar isotopes of human emotion, their passion less explosive than merely uncontained, progressing inexorably toward meltdown. Zlotowski flags up an underlying debt to westerns via a mechanical rodeo bull which our hero bests in the opening movement, while a throbbing soundtrack (are those pulses the sound of blood coursing through veins, or of radiation seeping through lead-lined walls?) nods toward the doomed romance of dystopian future fantasy.